I Want Her Dead

Based on petty and absurd true events in his hometown, this documentary written and directed by Gianluca Matarrese tells a darkly comic and emotionally charged tale of an unhappy Southern Italian family on the verge of implosion. In a remote Calabrian village, a domestic war rages between family members living on top of each other in Contrada Viscigliette in a handful of streets clinging to a hill known as Il Cozzo. Luisa, a fierce and headstrong woman, is at war with her sister-in-law Imma, fuelling a bitter feud that consumes their entire household. As tensions spiral, three eccentric aunts in a tragicomic chorus stage a surreal family “trial” in a last-ditch effort to restore peace. Blending reality and fiction, farce and tragedy, this film delivers an inventive meditation on reconciliation and forgiveness to explore the meaning of blood ties, as the family walks the fine line between everyday resentment and irreversible catastrophe.

Born in 1980, Gianluca Matarrese is a Calabrian director who has been living and working in Paris since 2002. He started in the French television industry, contributing to over 25 programs in fiction and entertainment. His first feature-length documentary was Everything Must Go (2019). Over the past five years, he has directed nine films, including The Zola Experience (2023), which was selected for Venice Critics' Week.